online

It was hard to get in the swing of things with the Bionic Commando multiplayer. The game has everything you’d want in an online shooter mode: guns, rocket launchers, a possible experience system and an amazing bionic arm.

At Capcom’s preview for the game on Tuesday, I tried to like the deathmatches, but they didn’t stand out. I spent a good hour blasting multicolored opponents and trying to dodge blasts. You’d think that the arm would add a new wrinkle to the gameplay, but from what I played, it made moving around more annoying than anything else.

To actually survive in the deathmatch, swinging your arm is required. Moving around by foot is agonizingly slow and it’s not recommended. Running is akin to waving around a white flag and saying “Kill me. Kill me now. I’m a newb.” to your opponents. Suffice to say, a bionic commando on foot is as vulnerable as a snail without its shell.More on Bionic Commando on the jump

Sony finally showed off a little more of the often-delayed Home. The online world was originally introduced last year at the Game Developers Conference. Since then, it has hit a couple of snags but SCEA chief Jack Tretton swears the final product will be great.

“I absolutely assure you that it will be worth it,” he said. “Itâ€™s the binding network. It will provide the ultimate social experience for gamers.”

In the meantime, we got to watch this trailer, which featured among other things better environments. The world of Home looks a lot better since the last time I saw it. There’s actually an identity to it. I can see cityscapes and new rooms. It wasn’t some weird pseudopavilion. I swear the first time I saw Home’s environments it was like watching Defending Your Life.

The biggest news was that Home would support themed rooms for games. They showed one for Resistance 2and another for what looked like Warhawk. They basically resemble a Disney-fied version of the games.

The Resistance room had memorabilia from the game and players were examining things like a Chimeran enclosed in a plastic tube. There were exposed wires everywhere and people’s avatars were wandering around like it was nothing. These rooms also seem to serve another purpose. From the trailer, it looks like they serve as a gateway into a game with a group of players.

More than a year ago, when Phil Harrison was still the head guy at Sony Computer Entertainment, he talked about the PlayStation 3 version of SingStar, its karaoke video game. The big thing he pointed out was that there would be downloadable songs, customization and PlayStation Eye support.

It was part of his big Web 2.0 comes to games speech. Now, SingStar PS3 is finally seeing the light of day. The PlayStation blog posted more details about the game, including a release date May 20.